Heroes Not Zombies

The most amazing weather system built up in the sky over the course of yesterday and as the sun set I saw this fabulous sight.

Transience and flow. These two phenomena are closely connected and lie at the heart of what I see everywhere in life. Life is a dynamic flow of energy, information and materials. In fact, not only “Life”, but Nature. All natural phenomena are dynamic, moving, changing, developing from one form into another.

I love this sense of flow. It invigorates me!

Transience is appreciated in the changing of the seasons. The most intense celebration of transience I’ve witnessed is in Japan when the cherry blossom appears. I remember seeing charts on the TV in Tokyo, like weather charts, but instead of showing the development of the rain or the sun over the country, they showed the spreading of the cherry blossom from the south to the north. I’ve seen cherry blossom photographs on the front pages of the national newspapers in Japan and I’ve milled around with crowds of picnickers, photographers and wanderers amongst groves of cherry blossoms. It’s a delight.

But there’s something else which comes with transience and flow and I think this weather system I saw yesterday really captures it. Dynamic change shows us how difficult it is to split our reality into pieces, pieces with clear boundaries or edges.

There are two edges which catch my eye in this photo. The edge of the cloud and the somewhat more metaphorical edge of the sunlight.

Clouds don’t have distinct edges of course, as you’ll have seen for yourself if you’ve ever looked out the window of a plane as it flies into, or out of, a cloud. The closer you look, the harder it is to see an edge. It’s that old “becoming not being” thing I have at the top of my blog. That constant becoming makes it pretty tricky to separate any one thing from another….from the cloud, and the “not-cloud”!

Have you ever just stood, or sat, and watched as the sunlight fades?

I don’t just mean watching the sun sink beneath the horizon (or, form another perspective, watching the Earth rise). I mean watching the light fade, the shades of colour change…..you can’t really separate it out into pieces can you? It’s a beautiful way to experience flow.

So we can get close to the edge can’t we? But the closer we get, the harder it is to pin it down!

I love that.